Bill Brown

Bill Brown is Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture in the Department of English Language and Literature and Deputy Dean for Academic and Research Initiatives in the Division of the Humanities. His research focuses on popular literary genres such as science fiction and the Western, on recreational forms such as baseball and kung fu, and on the ways that mass-cultural phenomena from roller coasters to Kodak cameras impress themselves on the literary imagination. He is currently working on the intersection of literary, visual, and material cultures, an inquiry that asks how inanimate objects enable human subjects (individually and collectively) to form and transform themselves. Brown is co-editor of Critical Inquiry and is a Fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. He is the author of A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2003) and editor of Things (University of Chicago Press, 2004).